Julia Bodensteiner
ESO Fellow
'Black hole police' discover a dormant black hole outside our galaxy
Click here to read our ESO press release about the recently detected quiescent black-hole binary VFTS 243.
'Closest black hole' system found to contain no black hole
Click here to read our ESO press release on new GRAVITY and MUSE data of HR 6819, and here to watch the corresponding ESOcast.
Closest black hole turns out to not be a black hole after all
Click here to read our KU Leuven press release on our new interpretation of the spectroscopic data available for HR 6819.
KU Leuven PhD student clears up massive (black hole) confusion
Click here to read how my fellow PhD student M. Abdul-Masih and our entire team at KU Leuven showed that LB-1 does not contain a 70-solar-mass black hole.
Outreach activities
As part of the Flemisch initiative "Science Figured Out", I presented my science to a wieder public in a short, 2-minutes video. In this video, I explain what the stars I study have in common with ballerinas, and why I want to study their rapid spins around their own axis.
In spring 2019, I gave a talk in a bar in the context of the world-wide science festival Pint of Science. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemics, we had to come up with new ideas to reach the public. One of these is Couch of Science, an online version bringing Pint of Science to everyone's homes. Together with two colleagues, I joined an online discussion about one of our recent publications.
Another outreach platform I am actively participating is the Skype a Scientist initiative, which virtually connects scientists with teachers and classrooms all over the world. In the past two years, I talked to more than ten different classrooms in four different continents.